I have my MacBook set to go to sleep after 2 minutes while on battery (via the Energy Saver preference pane.) However, when I leave it idle, it only turns off the screen—it does not actually sleep. This means that if I leave it and forget to close the lid, it always ends up with a dead battery.
The system sleeps correctly if it is triggered manually ( – Sleep) or by closing the lid. I have tested it with no USB devices connected and on a fresh user account, on the chance a background program was preventing sleep. There is no relevant information printed to the Console at the time when the system should sleep.
I've performed a PRAM and SMC reset to no avail, as well as the usual superstitious Verify Disk Permissions.
Is there anything else I should try before I reinstall OS X?
This is a MacBookPro5,5
running OS 10.6.6.
It's worth noting that I suffered from this issue some time ago due to a bug in a helper daemon for the product Things, but that this issue was slightly different and involved display sleep. Also, I have verified that the helper daemon was not running during my tests.
Additional information:
I started working through the Apple document titled "Why your Mac might not sleep or stay in sleep mode." I discovered that this issue does not appear when I Safe Boot my computer. I diff
'd the process lists and discovered that the following programs are only running when in normal boot, and are thus possible culprits:
Quick Look Helper
cvmsComp_x86_64
kextcache
launchd
mdworker
mdworker
nmblookup
vmnet-bridge
vmnet-dhcpd
vmnet-dhcpd
vmnet-natd
vmnet-netifup
vmnet-netifup
Best Answer
To help debug sleeping issues, try the
pmset
command in the terminal:In this case, it's the process 2520 messing up. Check it out in activity monitor and kill it (/usr/sbin/coreaudiod started by iTunes).
After that, run the command again:
No flags for PreventUserIdleSystemSleep.